Shark Skin
by misprint
Summary: You realized, crouched underneath a bush, clutching your rifle to you as though it was a lover, that you weren’t looking to join up with Easy company. You were looking for Joe. Slash, graphic.


**Disclaimer: **I do not know the men of Easy Company, and while it would be an honor to meet them, I want to make it very clear that this work is not based on the real men who served in World War II. I am not implicating that this is what really happened, what could have happened, or was the intention of any of the men. Nor do I believe that this should have happened or want it to have happened, the actual David Webster and Joseph Liebgott have little to do with me. This is based entirely off the HBO series which in turn was based off of a book by Stephen Ambrose which in turn was based off of the vets. Please do not take this as an accusation, mockery, or implication concerning the real men - it is based entirely off actors Eion Bailey and Ross McCall, and their portrayal of the two men, and the chemistry I believed that they had on screen.

When it comes to writing Band of Brothers slash I do not do it often, and if I do, I am picky about exactly who it is I am slashing. In respect of how upset it may make people, I only choose the characters that I think show any sort of chemisty on screen, namely Nixon/Winters and Liebgott/Webster. And again, these stories are based entirely on the fictionalized characters and the actors who portray them, _not_ the real vets. If this turns your stomach, then please do not read on. There are plenty of excellent stories on this site that do not contain slash (personally, I'd recommend "Gun Types" and "It's Okay" by Ivory Novelist, she has a flair for character).

You've been dully warned.

**Shark Skin**

The first time this happened, it happened with noise in the background.

It happened under the distant clink of beer bottle necks hitting the rim of glasses, the shouts and laughter of the enlisted men, the toasts to Currahee, to Winters, to to showers, to pin up girls, to "Sobel, that son of a bitch!" It happened in the thin, clean darkness, the unusual but pleasant coolness of a usually hot and sticky Georgia night in the Toccoa camp. It happened under the yellow buzz of beer, the drunken, tripping footfalls outside, the left over laughter, the vague awareness that it was Joe tugging insistently on your wrist and leading you away from the thick, strong shafts of light that spilled from the mess hall windows, Joe that was leaving the hall with you in his grip, Joe that was whispering come on college boy come on come on...it happened on the other side of the wall, pressed up against it you could feel your back vibrating with the noise inside and the heat outside and the tightness and the dizziness and the still center of your insides and the wetness of his lips and oh god, it happened, it happened.

You distinctly recall the no. It fell from your lips like it meant something to someone, it didn't mean anything to Joe. He caught at your mouth as though he was starving and had not tasted food for years, and if it weren't for your fingers clenching the front of his blouse in desperate fistfuls and your eyes opening and catching his closed tight like he was screaming you knew you knew you knew he would have eaten you alive. No, you tried to say, like it mattered. There were so many other words to say, so many words that cursed and screamed and cut and bite but no was the only one you could think of, you couldn't even say that.

But as always, there are no words for Joe. Joe doesn't take words. Joe just takes what he wants.

After the shock passed, the buzzing numbed in your ears and you became intensely aware of every detail. Although you had seen Joe shave just that morning, you could feel the rasp of baby stubble around his thin lips. The collar underneath your thumb was frayed, the knee pressing against yours was hard as stone, the bite of your newly won jump wings as his chest crushed yours, the hair that you suddenly found yourself grabbing up in shaking fistfuls was soft and slippery. All of Joe's colors, his smiles, his sharp movements were gathered up in you and you found yourself moaning. You didn't mean to. You didn't didn't mean to. And you did.

And you kissed back.

You had kissed girls before, even though no one in the company would believe it. You remembered those kisses not in sensations, but in words. Cool. Plump. Taste. Lipstick. Strawberry. You wrote these words in sentences and touched your lips later and wondered if that's what all the fuss was about. But kissing Joe Liebgott was entirely about sensation, the words lost their pith and became only meaningless representation. To your surprise, you found yourself thinking "shark skin" over and over and over until he was gone, and you were left with a dizzy head, buzzing wet lips, your fingers pressed up against them in wonder and an unsettling want that left you - your nose wrinkled in disgust at the cliché - very very breathless.

You decided that you would forget about it. The next day during jump training, cradled in the belly of that plane and yelling louder than you ever thought you could - eight okay, seven okay, six okay - you felt Joe's hand slide over the jut of your hip, even though there was nothing, nothing he could possibly check there, you realized that _he_ had decided not to forget. You burned all the way to the ground.

You thought maybe the war would put it out of your mind. Joe Liebgott, his lingering touches, his chain smoking, his nasty little smile. You thought that floating down through a sky full of fire, you might be thinking of other things than him giving last minute hair cuts at the air field, making sure that his fingers scraped along your cheekbone as he slowly snipped away at the too-long strands. But his touch felt like a wound, followed you over the ocean. About a million times during that night you raised your own fingers to your face, sure that a stray bullet had grazed your cheek, when it was just that unsettling, lingering burn.

You realized, crouched underneath a bush, clutching your rifle to you as though it was a lover, that you weren't looking to join up with Easy company. You were looking for Joe.

That was all so long ago. Here, in Hagenau, you can barely believe that the words you once wrote -Toccoa, Carentan, D-Day, the hospital - the words of a naive, Harvad-coddled private were once yours. You don't mention Joe, you see as you flip through the notebook, but his presence runs underneath your sentences like a hard, heavy undercurrent, rushing through nooks and crannies and soaking into the foundation. He is there, smiling out from between awkward juxtaposition and the rows and rows of scratched out terms that just weren't right. You remember the way that he used to smile at you, there used to be something genuine underneath that shark-toothed grin.

Now, after four months of recuperation for you and four months of cool, cracking, permeating frost for him, there is nothing there but hunger.

The warmth and comfort of the hospital gave way to the abrupt, gritty roughness of your first day back. Joe had led you to a secluded alleyway and, with the rattle of machine fire and the deep, earth rumbling explosions as your backdrop, he had either fought you or fucked you until you were down on the cobblestone, you weren't sure which. This time, when you said no, you knew that he had heard you, knew it because you were staring him straight in the eye, your mouth half open and your fingers tingling and his lips curling up into a smile. All you were sure of is that the moment you hit the ground you were sore as hell and still achingly, achingly hard for him. Even then he wouldn't touch you, he made you touch yourself, when you came it was only half good knowing that his smile was all mocking and his hands were at his sides.

"Ain't half as good as I remember it bein'," he had whispered in your ear, his voice tinged with roughness. "But then again, you had a nice long time in the hospital to go bad, didn'tcha?"

Shark skin.

Joe's touches, the touches that you used to think had left wounds, actually began to. You woke up with bruises that you didn't earn in battle, cuts that were the shape of Joe's teeth and half crescent scars reminiscent of nails curving into your flesh. Sore in places that soldiers usually had no call to be sore in. It wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for the fact that Joe's smile hounded you, and he was the first to grin when you winced as you sat down. If this were any other boy, if this were Luz or Muck or Perconte that was so quick to mock you at every turn, you would have resolved it by punching them until your knuckles bled long ago.

But you end up sharing a mattress with Joe Liebgott in Thalhum, camped out in a dank basement with no windows. And he doesn't even need to pull you away any more. You go to him.

But if anything sticks in your mind, it is this:

The night before Landberg, you are not ready for him. You sit on the mattress, face in hands, don't look up as kneels in front of you, runs his hand through your too long hair, curls his fingers into it and scratches at your scalp. Just thinking of him makes you hard, you know it, he knows it, but the feeling now makes you choke instead of warm to his touch.

You didn't take your anger out on Joe. You took it out on the other men with withering glares and monotone corrections, took it out on the bullets you fired, the Krauts you killed, took it out on the rows and rows of faceless Germans who had brought you here in the first place, who had brought you to this man, this crazy bastard and his addictive smile in the first place.

"You're goin' crazy," he tells you, his other hand finding your knee. "You think you seen too much war and you're goin' crazy."

"I'm not crazy," you say into your hands.

"Buck Compton only went crazy after he saw his friends shot apart, after he saw too many trees explode," Joe says, and you slump back against the wall, knowing that you're in for heavy punishment. "And here..._college boy_ is already losin' it just 'cuz he's upset...what was it? Oh yeah. _That we dragged our asses halfway around the world for this._"

"Joe..." you begin.

He kisses you. Quickly, urgently, he coaxes you down onto your back, roughly shoves your pants over your hip bones, pulls your undershirt over your stomach. His hands are rough, and even though the basement is moderately warm, you can feel the cold of Bastogne in the scrape of his palms. The cold you never knew, the cold he will never let you forget you never knew.

"Joe," you repeat through his lips, but he breaks the kiss and it burns like a wound. Without speaking he flips you over, you hear the rip of his own fly, the clink of his dog tags as he leans over you. For a few cool seconds before he presses up against you, you can feel his breath against the thin lobe of your ear, and it makes you shiver.

"Joe..." you say again, but you can already feel his stomach against your back, his leg sliding in behind yours, he is pushing himself hard into you and your mouth opens, your head tilts back, everything inside you clenches up tight and you have already lost.

The next time you say his name, it will be in a groan.

This is maddening, he thrusts into you, it is maddening to think that everything you despise, his breath comes out hard against the side of your face and it is tinged with a groan, maddening to think that you can hate something that your own body will betray you with in the end, you are still hard as he roughly reaches down and grabs you with one hand, pumping you so rough that it's almost painful, but you don't say anything. You can't say anything. All you can think is that this is ugly, this is so ugly, an ugly thing in an ugly war and Joe is still fucking you, cussing in German but you understand every word because it's like he said, your German's as good as his.

You are trapped, moaning and panting, waiting, tensing until you finally reach climax and the muscles along your back tense, he can feel them through your shirt. After a few moments - you are lost right now, swimming in nothingness - his fingernails dig into your chest and he's done. He rolls off of you, grabs the covers, and pulls them up tight around his chest.

In the next five minutes, he is asleep, you can tell because his breath is deep and raspy. You close your eyes, try to ignore the throbbing of your entire body, try not to think about waking up early to clean yourself up before someone comes down to wake you, trying to forget exactly what it was that Liebgott was whispering in German, but the words dance through your head; mocking you as all words eventually seem to do. Cool. Plump. Taste. Lipstick. Strawberry.

Shark skin.

When Joe pressed his lips up against the ridge of your ear and fucked you, he cursed and called you a whore and threatened and jeered and he let slip these three words, three words that he bit the ends off of as though he had not meant to say them: cold, need, love.

The night after that, you smell like death. The mattress smells like death. Your thin, hard pillow smells like death. Everything smells like everything else except now you recognize it for what it really is: it is charred skin, thick impersonal blocks of bread, free prisoners still sleeping in their cells, and the terrified face of the butcher that you had held at gun point and called a nazi a nazi a nazi...

Hitler was dead, and he was part of the stench.

If the boys called you bitter it was nothing to what you are now. You cannot not sleep, you cannot not sit, you pace the dark confines of your basement and kick at the walls and punch the mattress and swear hard into your fist. It isn't fair that you are here, prisoner in Germany in a basement and under the touch of a boy who doesn't care for you any more than he cares for his own fist on a cold, lonely night. It isn't fair that some insane, twisted politician with a hunger for power and death has dragged you here and for what? _For what_? It isn't fair that he had done this and then killed himself before you could get to him with a butterfly knife like Toye had said so long ago a butterfly knife that you would drag across his throat. Not just for yourself but for the gypsies, the communists, the artists, the writers, the Jews, God Jesus Christ almighty for the Jews.

There were so many things in that camp that had scared you. Big hollow space, big hollow ovens, hollow barracks, hollow stomachs, hollow eyes. You had seen the shape of bones through the skin. You had signed on for death and destruction when you joined the paratroopers, so you passed by the wounded soldiers without even looking twice. But these people had signed on for nothing, and your eyes were stuck to them, you stared out the back of the jeep even as it raced back through the forest, you could _feel_ that camp no matter where you went that day.

And you knew that Joe could as well.

As you and he arrived at the camp, you could feel the way he stopped, he froze, he stared at the barbed wire fences and the people hanging off of them as though somehow, without even knowing, he knew. And as the soldiers pushed forwards, pushing the gates back and opening the barracks and coming on the skeleton corpses and the hollowed out children and the dead eyed men, Joe hung back, turned away, staring at the ground, unwilling to set foot inside that hell unless he had to.

"Jews," he had told Winters, lips pressed tight up together, "they're Jews."

You hear his footsteps, can trace him crossing the floor above you, smashing the door open, taking to the stairs, appearing before you, wild fire, shark skin, his eyes connecting with yours for one brief second before he drops them, tearing off his coat angrily, throwing it to the floor.

"Joe?" You ask.

"Fuck you," he spits, pointing one long finger at you, his eyes blazing like you have never seen them before. "Fuck _you,_ fuck _Hitler,_ fuck the god damn S.S. and everyone in that god damn town who sat back for years and years and _years_ and let them..."

He cuts off abruptly, but he won't stop pointing at you. You are pinned with his gaze, every nerve in your body is tingling, every cell in you wants to grab him and shake him or kiss him, you don't know what.

There is a silence, and you realize that the jerking hitch in Joe's shoulders means that he is biting back sobs.

"They're still at the camp," he says. "And we took their bread. They can't eat. They're stuck in those fucking...those fucking _huts._"

You open your mouth to say something, but there is nothing to say. Joe's presence sucks your words up out of you. You are lost.

"Why?" You finally manage.

"I don't know!" Joe yells, his voice is thin, shrill, rough. "I don't fucking know!"

It happens quick. It happens so quick, you don't even know who goes to whom, whether it's you that moves first or him that takes those first shaking steps or whether you are too much a part of each other to know either way, but in seconds you are together, his hands are curled tight against your upper arms and your pulling him against your chest and burying your face in his hair and he is pressing his face into your chest and crying and crying and crying, and the two of you sink to the floor, clutching to one another until it hurts and you can't breathe again. You can never breathe around Joe.

As you hold him fast to you, you spin through a world of memories. Joe, cutting your hair for the first time, his eyes catching yours as he leans forwards to cut your bangs and you see that smile, full on, it blew you away. Joe, sneering at Sobel behind his back, back in a time when he was all words. Joe, running Curahee, not tired enough to grin at you and ask if hey, hey college boy, you tired yet? Joe, pouring you another beer and flicking your jump wings mockingly. Joe, grabbing your wrist and leading you outside, Joe pushing you up against the wall, Joe breathing on your mouth, Joe kissing, kissing, kissing you like nothing else matters...

You let out a long breath. It warms the top of his scalp, warms your own lips, warms you.

After a moment he stops crying, abruptly, as though he realizes exactly how hard the sobs are choking him. He sniffs, you can feel his shoulders jerking up and down as he struggles. The familiar shape of him in your arms is enough to make your heart skip a beat, he is not cursing you, fighting you, fucking you. You are holding one another.

"Fucking war," he says to no one in particular. You nod. "God damn fucking...fucking..."

"Joe," you say, but you can't follow it up. Joe cannot be put into words. You might have thought this before, but it doesn't get any less true.

You'll fight again. You know that. You'd be stupid not to know that. You know his mocking smile, his angry words, his quick fists will never go away. It will, however, be the last time you see Joe Liebgott cry. He wipes his eyes briskly on his sleeve, but looks up at you anyways and for the first time you feel like maybe you might matter.

That night, you sleep in one another's arms. His skin is rough, the skin of a shark, but his mouth is soft, and you yield to it easily. Or maybe he is yielding to you.


End file.
